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My best friend in primary school was a girl called Catherine. I have never been able to remember when we first became friends or putting it another way, I can't remember a time when we weren't friends.

Catherine was super-intelligent. I was better described as bright. Together, we didn't quite fit with the other girls in school, who were mostly into perms, My Little Ponies, picking on the poor kids and giggling about boys. We liked those things too (other than bullying and boys, who quite frankly, were beneath us), but we really preferred creating and becoming immersed in our own world.

Another girl was briefly allowed to enter our universe when we got to Top Infants class. Rebecca, or Gloworm, as we used to call her (being the nearest we could come to pronouncing her Czech surname which began with a G, plus an oddly popular toy when I was small) was a disruptive influence and was always getting us into trouble. For a while, we delighted in the novelty of flouting authority, but she was soon given short shrift when we discovered that she had slyly been playing us off against each other in an attempt to oust one of us from our group.